The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Moe Berg saved things, and so a great many of the papers, documents, menus, ticket stubs, draft cables, letters, and photographs he accumulated during his life still exist. Ethel Berg left a number of her brother’s personal papers in the collection of the library at the Columbia University law school, New York, and in the Morris “Moe” Berg Special Collection of the New York Public Library. I am grateful to Whitney S. Bagnall at Columbia for her assistance. A number of private collectors and historians own Moe Berg materials, and several of them were kind enough to allow me access. Berg left a great deal of material at the house of his brother, Sam, and Sam Berg, in turn, presented much of it to Charles Owen, who has been researching Moe Berg longer than anyone else. Charles Owen shared a great many things with me—most crucially, his collection of Moe Berg’s personal papers, notebooks, and photographs. I thank him for everything. Thomas Powers, the author of Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, opened his compendious files to me. Lou Jacobson gave me the run of his collection of Berg materials, including the text of an interview he conducted with Dr. Samuel Berg. What the novelist Joel Barr had to show me made the trip to see him in Florida well worth it. Irwin Berg lent me some of his Berg material and much of his enthusiasm for the subject. Warren Berg, Renata Ferri, Terry Curtis Fox, Ed Goldman, William Horrigan, Aldo lcardi, and Dr. Murray Strober all sent me valuable material. Other useful research material was given to me by Captain John L. Bender, Paul Busse, Robert Fish, Dr. Hardy Hendron, Arnold Kramish, and Joseph M. Overfield.

  The OSS papers are stored at the National Archives, Military Records Division, in Washington, D.C. I spent months there, tracking Berg’s OSS career by picking through thousands of overstuffed boxes of old records and hundreds of spools of microfilm. The OSS records are only now beginning to be catalogued, and whatever gold I found in that unruly river of paper is because of the assistance I received from Larry MacDonald, Ed Reese, and especially the ever-patient, always-helpful John Taylor. People wishing to see the OSS and Manhattan Project documents relevant to Moe Berg’s OSS career should consult Record Group 77, Entry 22; Record Group 226, Entries 88, 90, 92, 108, 108-B, 124, 134, 134-E, 137, 140, 146, 174, 190. Note that Record Group 226, Entry 140, Box 19, Folder 155 contains the Project Larson file and that the AZUSA file is contained in Record Group 226, Entry 134, Box 228. Record Group 165, Box 138 contains the Alsos Mission records, as does the Manhattan Engineer District records Entry 5, Box 64. (Some of the Berg portion of this material is also contained in Berg’s declassified CIA file, which the CIA makes available to researchers upon request.) On microfilm, M-1108 and M-1109 are documents from the Alsos Mission, and M-1642 contains William Donovan’s OSS Director’s Files. In our separate lengthy investigations of this material, Tom Powers and I found a great deal of information about Berg’s war. We both think that future research may well yield even more.

  The other formal collections and archives I consulted include the American Institute of Physics Niels Bohr Library, College Park, Maryland, which owns many of the Samuel Goudsmit papers; the Biloxi (Mississippi) Public Library, where I thank Murella Hebert Powell; the Bobst Memorial Library, New York University, New York; the Bostonian Society; the Brooklyn Public Library; the California Institute of Technology archives in Pasadena; the Hoover Institution Library and archives in Palo Alto, California, which owns the Stanley Hornbeck papers, and where I thank Linda Bernard; the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Tokyo, where I thank Miwako Atarashi; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., audio archives, where interested visitors can listen to the recordings of Moe Berg’s appearances on the radio show “Information Please!”; the Library of Congress microfilm collection of American newspapers; the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, where I thank Anita Jacobson; the Museum of Television and Radio, New York; the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown, New York, which has a file of newspaper articles about Moe Berg, and where I thank Bill Deane, Tom Heitz, and Pat Kelly; the NBC radio archives, which have partial transcripts of some of Berg’s appearances on “Information, Please!”, and where I thank Catherine Lim; the Newark (New Jersey) Public Library, which has many of the old Newark News articles about Berg, as well as some of Samuel Berg’s papers and photographs, and where I thank Charles Cummings; the New Jersey Historical Society, where I thank Nancy Blankenhorn; the New York Public Library’s copy of the U.S. patent registry and its microfilm collection of American newspapers; the New York Times library; the Princeton University Alumni Records office in Princeton, New Jersey, where I thank Rick Ryan; the Princeton University Office of Athletic Communications, where I thank Mark Panus and Chuck Sullivan; the Princeton University Archives, where I thank Ben Primer and Nanci Young; the Reading (Pennsylvania) Public Library; the Rockefeller Archives Center at Pocantico Hills, New York, where I thank Darwin Stapleton; the Sports Illustrated library, New York, where I thank Linda Wachtel; the Time & Life Library, which has a modest file of Berg-related clippings and memoranda; the United States Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I found relevant material in Boxes 78, 78-B, and 81-B of the William Donovan papers, and where I thank Richard Sommers; the United States Department of State Archives at the National Archives in Washington, where I thank Dane Hartgrove and Milton Gustofson; the United States National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri; the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey’s Samuel Berg special collection in Newark, where I thank Barbara S. Irwin.

  The CIA and the FBI both released material to me after I placed requests for it under Freedom of Information and Privacy legislation. John H. Wright at the CIA and J. Kevin O’Brien at the F.B.I. were as helpful as they could be.

  Without exception, the past and present CIA employees whom I spoke with went out of their way to do what they could for me. I am permitted to thank some of them by name: William Colby, Gary Foster, Richard Helms, Charles McCarry, and Moe Berg’s great fan, the ebullient Linda McCarthy.

  Two previous biographies of Berg have been published. The first was Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy, written, with the cooperation of Berg’s brother, Sam, by Louis Kaufman, Barbara Fitzgerald, and Tom Sewell. Ethel Berg, Moe’s sister, did not cooperate with the authors of this book, threatened to sue if her name appeared in it, and wrote and published at her own expense My Brother Morris Berg: The Real Moe, a panegyrical response to it. Her book is, in fact, more of an annotated scrapbook than a biography. Both books contain much valuable material and also many factual inaccuracies. Thomas Powers’s Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb contains a superb portrait of Berg’s OSS career. Of the many newspaper articles written about Berg, I think the best are those written by Berg’s friends Ira Berkow, “The Catcher Was Highly Mysterious,” New York Times, December 14, 1989, and Jerome Holtzman, “A Great Companion,” Sporting News, June 24, 1972. John Kieran’s witty columns, published during the 1930s and early 1940s in the New York Times, are indispensable reading for Berg aficionados.

  In 1979, the Japanese television company NHK produced The Spy Who Loved Japan, a mid-length documentary film about Berg made by the famous reporter Jiro Hirano and the director Yoshihisa Hayashi. Hirano went on to publish The Spy Who Loved Japan, a book about his experiences while making the film.

  In 1992, NBC presented a brief, seven-minute film about Berg entitled To Catch a Spy, which was produced by Ann Kemp and reported by Stan Bernard.

  In May 1992, I received a brief note postmarked Newark, which reads: “I knew Ethel Berg well, for many years. I have a few interesting stories to tell. Her brother Moe Berg used to hide in a room built by my father, so I am told. My father knows much but may be somewhat tight lipped.” It was signed only Michele, with a telephone number that has been disconnected, and with no return address. While such an experience was fully in keeping with Berg, most of the other letter writers I heard from were less elusive. Among the many people from whom I received helpful correspondence are the following: Heinz Albers, George
R. Allen, Ugo Amaldi, Roger Angell, Miwako Atarashi, Samuel D. Atkins, Joel Barr, J. Paul Barringer, Jonathan Bayliss, John L. Bender, Irwin M. Berg, Edward Bernstein, Felix Boehm, Horace J. Bresler, Earl D. Brodie, Alyn Brodsky, Ethan Casey, Thomas T. Chappell, Frances Chichowski, Michael Choukas, Jr., Paul A. Ciccone, Sheldon Cohen, Josephine Colluci, Joe Crowley, Charles F. Cummings, Robert B. Daroff, Stephen R. Dujack, Melvin Edelstein, Richard A. Evans, Mariette Fay, Margaret Feldman, Renata Ferri, James O. Freedman, Fumihiro Fujisawa, Margaret Jennings Gahan, C. V. Garnett, Allen Ginsberg, Irene B. Goudsmit, Stephen Jay Gould, A. J. Greenberg, Donald W. Griffin, Fritz Gygi, John R. Hall, Barry Halper, Bill Hannis, Lee Harrison, John Healy, Mary Hedges, Jiro Hirano, Fred H. Hitchcock, Jr., Lawrence R. Houston, Aldo lcardi, Masaru Ikei, Barbara S. Irwin, Louis Jacobson, Lyall E. Johnson, David Kahn, Monroe Karasik, Esther M. Kelser, Daniel J. Kevles, Paul J. Kiell, Margaret F. Kieran, Lyman Kirkpatrick, Arnold Kramish, Bernie Levy, Robert Lindsay, Hannah Litzky, Cecil B. Lyon, Jane I. Lyons, Linda McCarthy, June P. McElroy, Elizabeth McIntosh, Jean Makrauer, Mario Marti, Arnie Matanky, Abe Matlo, Ron Menchine, Chris Mohr, William J. Morgan, Bingham Morris, William Moskowitz, Timothy Naftali, Klara Nil-Walti, Lou Nucci, Eugenia O’Connor, Charles O’Neill, Ellen O’Neill, Joseph M. Overfield, Carmel Pallante, Victor Parsonnet, Jonathan S. Reed, George Reynolds, Richard Rhodes, Lawrence Ritter, Rodman C. Rockefeller, Lester Rodney, Philip Roth, Marjory B. Sanger, Kazuo Sayama, Morris U. Schappes, Norman Seidelman, Elizabeth Shames, Melville D. Shapiro, William D. Sharpe, David Shulman, Uriel Simri, Russell Sinoway, Seymour Siwoff, Clare H. Smith, John Snell, Murray Strober, Ted Tannenbaum, John Vernon, Robert T. Wallace, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.

  Some of these letters were prompted by author’s queries that appeared in Jewish Currents, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Newark Star Ledger, and the Washington Post.

  In Tokyo, Japan, I thank Miwako Atarashi of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Fumihiro “Fu-Chan” Fujisawa, Yoshihisa Hyashi, Kathleen Kouril, Takenori Seki, the director of the Publications Section at Saint Luke’s Hospital, and Yasuaki Suda, sports editor of the Mainichi newspapers. I am also grateful to my friend Michie Yamakawa, who generously helped me to translate Japanese documents, including those written by Moe Berg, when I returned to New York.

  In Italy, I thank George Armstrong of Rome; Gilberto Bernardini of La Romala, Florence; Giorgio Salvini of the Accademia de Lincei in Rome; and Vanna Wick of Torino. My friend Nicholas Weinstock accompanied me on this trip and served as an impeccable translator.

  In Switzerland, I am grateful to Heinz Albers of Zurich; Ugo Amaldi of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva; Johann Kloimstein, the head waiter at the Kronenhalle in Zurich; Ines Jucker of Bern; Jurg O. Lang of the Swiss Technical University (ETH) in Zurich; and Mario Marti of the Bern City Archives.

  The following people also assisted my research: Anthony Cave Brown, who is William Donovan’s biographer; Joseph Capobianco of Columbia University; Patricia DeJohn of New York University; Helena Foley of Barnard College; Patty Frank, who helped me with the title; Larry Freundlich; Carol Gluck of Columbia University; Stanley Goldberg, who is at work on a biography of General Leslie Groves; Joe Goldstein, who risked the wrath of Joe DiMaggio by putting me in touch with him; Geoffrey M. T. Jones, head of the Veterans of OSS, who accepted my many telephone calls with grace and good humor; Joan Karasik; Ann Kemp of NBC; Dana Kull, who made complex legal matters clear; Peter Kurth told me about Anastasia; Sylvia Pelikan of Hopkins School; Thomas Pinney of Pomona College; Doug Salas, who eased my computer woes; Paul A. Samuelson, who put me in touch with Philip Morrison at MIT; the OSS historian Richard Harris Smith; John Henry Williams, who made it possible to interview his father, Ted Williams; the Yale intelligence historian Robin Winks, who gave me good advice in the early going; and the Harvard historian John Womack, who told me how to learn more about Latin America in 1943.

  At Sports Illustrated, I thank the two fine managing editors I have worked for there, Mark Mulvoy and John Papanek; Myra Gelband, who asked me to write about Moe Berg; and Rob Fleder, Chris Hunt, Stella Kramer, and Stefanie Scheer, for their help with “Scholar, Lawyer, Catcher, Spy,” a piece I wrote about Moe Berg for the magazine’s March 23, 1992, issue. Amy Nutt answered a few late questions with aplomb.

  Stuart Krichevsky, of Sterling Lord Literistic in New York, is a terrific agent.

  At Pantheon, I want to thank Claudine O’Hearn and Alan Turkus. I can’t say how glad I am that Dan Frank is my editor. No one could have been kinder or more helpful.

  A number of friends accompanied me through this book, offering encouragement, criticism, and lodging in their homes when I came to town to conduct research. I want to thank Patrick Bennett, Ira Berkow, Rebecca Brian, Ted Conover, Sally Dawidoff, Frank Deford, Rachel Dretzin, Sue Halpern, Annette Hamburger, Laura Hilgers, Michael T. Kaufman, Adam Kolker, Mike Lindsay, Leila Luce, Sarah Lyall, Greg Lyss, Austin Murphy, George Packer, Sara Rimer, the Weinstock family, Jonathan Wiener, Jamie Wright, and Ginger Young. Charles Siebert listened in his cheerful way to everything I read aloud to him and responded with wonderful suggestions. When Tom Powers said “I’ll help you in any way I can,” he couldn’t have known what he was getting himself into, but he was good as his word, which anyone who knows him realizes is always the case.

  This book is dedicated to my mother, Heidi Gerschenkron Dawidoff, and to my grandmother Rebecca Dawidoff Rolland, cherished friends and beloved relations. As I wrote about Moe Berg, I thought often of two deceased members of my family, my grandfathers. Like Bernard Berg, Ted Dawidoff worked long hours in his pharmacy so that his children might try something else if they wished to. Grandpa Ted died before I was born, but everyone I know who met him says the same thing—that he was a bright, generous, and gentle man. Alexander Gerschenkron really did understand all those languages sportswriters said Moe Berg could speak. Russian-born, Grandpa Vati embraced this, his adopted country, where he taught his students at Harvard and everyone else who knew him so very much. One of the many things he taught me was to like baseball.

  Notes

  Prologue. Who Was Moe Berg?

  1 “When Linda McCarthy”: Interview with Linda McCarthy, Langley, Virginia.

  2 “Allan Siegalis”: Interview with Allan Siegal by telephone.

  3 “The offending sentences”: New York Times, February 28, 1993.

  4 “Charles Owen is”: Interview with Charles Owen, Washington, D.C.

  5 “during his sophomore”: Interview with Lou Jacobson, Princeton, New Jersey.

  6 “Moe Berg was a”: Interview with George R. Allen by telephone.

  7 “he had slept in”: “The Strange Story of Moe Berg, Athlete, Scholar, Spy,” by George R. Allen. A talk given at the annual J. William White Dinner of the Franklin Inn Club, Philadelphia, January 17, 1991, p. 2.

  8 “Irwin Berg is”: Interview with Irwin Berg, New York.

  Chapter 1. The Public Berg: Professor Moe

  1 “For Kieran earned”: See Jerome Holtzman, ed., No Cheering in the Press Box,” pp. 34–46. Interview with Margaret Ford Kieran by telephone, and correspondence from Margaret Ford Kieran.

  2 “most erudite sports writer”: Damon Runyon, New York Journal-American, October 27, 1936.

  3 “Kieran produced”: John Kieran, “An Obscure Baseball Item,” New York Times, December 8, 1938. My collection of Kieran clippings comes from the New York Times library. Kieran wrote many, many more Berg-related columns for the New York Times than I can discuss here, and readers who seek them out will not be disappointed. Some of my other favorites are “Barrister Berg Examines a Witness,” June 16, 1931; “A Baseball Barrage,” February 7, 1936; “Night Life in the Big Leagues,” February 14, 1940; and “Rain-Maker for Rent,” September 17, 1942.

  4 “In a January”: John Kieran, “When the Bookworm Returned,” New York Times, January 27, 1938.

  5 “The mysterious Berg”: See Ring Lardner, You Know Me,
Al.

  6 “For a 1937”: John Kieran, “What a Catcher Thinks About,” New York Times, September 13, 1937.

  7 “Berg is even”: John Kieran, “It Must Be Catching,” New York Times, January 31, 1939.

  8 “The volume was”: This clipping has no byline, and was given to me by Joel Barr. I have a surfeit of clips of the Professor Berg genre. Some others are “Dr. Berg, Backstop,” from May 1940, American Mercury; “He Can Talk Baseball in Ten Languages,” from Baseball magazine; and “Professor Berg Inspects Fenway,” by John Drohan, January 30, 1940. Many of these clips come from private collections, including Moe Berg’s, and are missing bylines and publication information.